Development Status May 2017

Posted on June 13, 2017

It's been in the works for a while, but we are finally ready to release the first iteration of our desktop support: EteSync DAV.
We also made many improvements and fixed issues in our existing clients and server. More info below.

Current State

As mentioned above, we are finally ready to release the first beta version of our desktop support.
While on the Android app we improved the look and feel of the change journal, improved sync performance, and fixed a few issues.

Desktop Support

You can finally use EteSync on your desktop using the new EteSync DAV. This package provides a CalDAV and CardDav proxy for EteSync,
essentially being a compatibility layer between DAV clients, such as Thunderbird, Outlook and Apple Mail and EteSync. After a short, ten seconds, configuration process, all you need is
to run etesync-dav and point your DAV client to it.

Because this solution is a DAV compatibility layer, it doesn't include a method to view the change journal, or share
journals with other users. For those you'd still need to use the Android client.

This is a beta release, and while most things should work, there may
be some rough edges. Please check out the README for more information about installation and known issues.

Improved Journal Look & Feel

The journal change list now uses coloured icons instead of text to indicate the action of each item, and in addition to the RAW vObject dump that was previously used, the journal item view
also shows items in a more user friendly way, similar to what you'd expect from contact and calendar apps.

Major Fixes and Improvements

There was an issue with supporting contact groups as reported by "359" (the user's preferred alias), which has now been fixed. [commit]

Thanks to the report of the group issue above, a local database corruption issue was uncovered. This issue would *not* result in data-loss, however it would result with the app not syncing until manually resolved. [commit]

In addition to the above we improved the journal fetching strategy to fix an annoying issue with some versions of Android, and work better on slow connections. Before this changed we used to fetch the whole journal in one go,
now we fetch it in chunks. This fixed sync on slow connections where downloading one big file could fail, and fix an issue where in some versions of Android, the sync adapter would be killed. More info in the commit.

To view the detailed lists of changes and the raw commit logs, please refer to the changelog files and commit histories of the respective projects, available from here.

Future Plans

We are still working on making it possible to use EteSync accounts from 3rd party apps on your device, so developers (ourselves included), would be able to write apps that utilise the journal capabilities in a secure manner. Two examples that come to mind (and are
often requested by users) are a note taking app, and bookmarks sync. More updates on that when we have things to share.

I would like to take this opportunity to remind you that we would like to hear your thoughts. Do you have some suggestions? Noticed an issue? Please send patches, report issues, or contact us.